David Dickinson - Death of an Old Master

‘Come back rich, my darling,’ she had said to him. ‘Then I can hold you in my arms all night long. Come back ever so rich.’

As he studied his red book Orlando came to an interesting conclusion. The table he had watched showed a very slight tendency to produce reds rather than blacks. Many people, he remembered, played a variety of a system called Martingale, made famous by Sir Francis Clavering in Thackeray’s Pendennis , who lost enormous sums through his blind belief in its efficiency. The system depended on waiting for a run of five successive blacks. Then, on the sixth spin, a bet was placed on red. If the winning number was black again, the bet was doubled. And so on through a vast variety of permutations. But Orlando knew there was a fault at the heart of the Martingale system. Its adherents believed that after five blacks in a row the odds must be in favour of a red next time. They were not. They were exactly the same each time. The wheel has no memory of where the ball landed last time round. Each time there was a fifty-fifty chance of red or black turning up. He resolved to bet in moderate amounts on red. Red after all was Imogen’s favourite colour. Nothing else. No almighty chance on a single number with odds of thirty-six to one against. No combinations of numbers, no pair , no impair , no passe. Just red. Mesdames et messieurs, je vous en prie. Faites vos jeux.

Orlando remembered being very nervous the first night he gambled seriously. The minimum stake was one thousand francs, just under ten pounds in English money. Orlando had one thousand pounds working capital, handed over to him out of Imogen’s bank accounts. He gambled the minimum stake which paid out the same amount if you won. One thousand francs would bring you another thousand. He brought a sketchbook with him. Sometimes while he watched he would dash off lightning drawings, character sketches of the croupiers or his fellow gamblers. He backed red eighteen times in all. If the law of averages had been perfect he would have won nine and lost nine. The law of averages was not perfect that first night. He won twelve times and lost six. The croupiers smiled at him as he left to collect his winnings. Gambling with such small stakes was never going to be a problem for the Societe des Jeux de Monte Carlo. On his trial run Orlando had made sixty pounds.

On the following two nights he increased his stakes very gradually. By day three he was five thousand pounds ahead. Five thousand pounds, he said sadly to himself, would never satisfy Imogen’s father. Twenty-five would do. Better thirty. Forty would be perfect.

On days four and five the casino had increased the size of the maximum permitted bet to one hundred thousand francs, roughly one thousand pounds in English money. Orlando’s system held. Behind his chair each night a small clean-shaven Frenchman with black eyes was watching. He was not watching the progress of the game. He watched the lightning sketches that Orlando threw off in his notebook.

‘Forgive me. Your drawings, monsieur,’ the Frenchman had said, ‘tonight they are in the style of Toulouse Lautrec, so good they could pass for the real thing. Can you draw in anybody else’s style, monsieur?’

Orlando Blane hardly heard him. He was counting his winnings. ‘Tomorrow night, monsieur,’ Orlando said very quietly, ‘I shall draw in the style of Degas.’

Now he was eighteen thousand pounds ahead. Was that enough? Would eighteen thousand be enough to marry his Imogen? Should he pay his bill, check out of his miserable auberge , head for the railway station and take the train home to London? Orlando did not. He did check out of his auberge. He booked himself into the grandest hotel in Monte Carlo and prepared himself for one final apocalyptic night of glory.

The doors of the casino closed at four o’clock that morning. At five minutes past the manager convened an emergency meeting in his room.

‘We cannot go on like this,’ he said. ‘Soon we may be in severe financial difficulties. This Englishman is winning too much. The other players too, they are putting their money on the red. They are winning too. What, in God’s name, is happening?’

The senior croupier shook his head. ‘I do not know, sir,’ he said. ‘He is not cheating. He is not interfering with the play in any way. It’s just red, red, red.’

‘Where is that damned Professor?’ said the manager angrily. The casino had summoned a Professor of Mathematics from the University of Nice, an expert in chance and probability, in the theory of patterns and numbers.

‘He was wandering round the gaming rooms the last time I saw him,’ said the casino security manager. ‘In fact he wasn’t actually upright, he was lying on the floor, checking that the table was perfectly level. Which it is, apparently.’

‘He was what?’ shouted the manager. ‘We are in danger of losing everything and this fool is crawling about on the floor! Is he drunk?’

‘No, I am not drunk,’ said the Professor of Mathematics. The Professor was in his middle fifties, with receding hair and thick glasses and a worried air. His hobby was collecting notes on the weather. He believed that if he kept his records long enough the day would come when he could predict with almost total certainty, ninety-three per cent probability in his private estimation, what the weather would be the following day. So far he had thirty years of weather records, originally kept in the back room of his house, now stored in a very large shed in his garden.

‘It is a most interesting phenomenon,’ the Professor began, looking at the casino staff as if they were a particularly dense collection of first year mathematics students, ‘this run of numbers should not have happened. But it has. For a student of probabilities, it could become a classic case. It will feature in the textbooks for years.’

‘Never mind your bloody textbooks, Professor,’ said the casino manager angrily. ‘This run has been going on for five days. Will it continue? Or will it stop?’

The Professor of Mathematics looked back in the notebook where the numbers were stored. He filled three pages with calculations written in a small spidery hand.

‘I am seventy-five per cent sure that the run on red will stop tomorrow. But it might not. It could, logically, carry on for ever, but I do not think it will.’ He smiled at the casino staff.

The manager stared at the Professor of Mathematics. He was used to these probabilities by now. He had yet to hear the man from the University of Nice get as far as a hundred per cent sure. Ninety-eight per cent was as good as it got.

‘But what do we do?’ said the manager. ‘We can’t close the casino down. They are a very superstitious lot, these winning gamblers. If we moved the table with a different wheel to a different room, what would you say the chances were of the Englishman continuing to play?’

The Professor leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. The three other men watched while the calculations whizzed round in his head.

‘Based on the studies of Professor Kuntzbuhl in Vienna, and Professor Spinetti of Rome, on the psychology of gamblers, based admittedly on work with prisoners in jail for non-payment of gambling debts in their respective cities, I should say the chances are between twenty-five and thirty per cent. They are very superstitious, these gamblers. Change the table, change anything at all and they feel their luck has gone. They stop playing.’

‘No more bets? None at all?’ said the manager sadly.

‘No more bets,’ said the Professor, firmly.

‘What else do you suggest, Professor?’ the casino manager felt sure the balding academic would have some suggestion. The casino didn’t pay him five thousand a year as a consultant for nothing.